Either Chidi speaking English is a continuity cock up (he actually speaks French, but the Good Place translates), or they’ve not really been brought back to life at all.  Based on series 2, I reckon they’ll give up the pretence after a couple of episodes at the most...

The thing is, I’ve thought that about The Good Place from pretty much episode one onwards, but they’ve consistently come up with a new trajectory - sometimes within the same episode.  (See - “dance Dance Resolution”)

I agree that I’m not convinced that there’s a mapped out over-arching arc - and the news that some of the cast have signed 7 series contracts fills me with a certain amount of dread - but at the moment I’m happy to trust them to go with it.  Besides, by sitcom standards it’s already gone to considerably more interesting places than normal.  I agree that it needs to stop if it ever starts treading water, but I don’t really buy the idea that the finale indicates that it’s doing anything of the sort.

As for conceptually lazy?  I suppose I saw it as a logical conceptual end point for series 2 - I would have felt much more cheated had we ended with last week’s, deliberately(?) lazy series of simple but meaningless tests.  As it is, the juxtaposition of the two - doing the right thing when you’re being judged versus doing the right thing for real, seemed like a nice summation of the themes of the series.